To help drive adoption of Teams, Microsoft have announced a couple of customer promotions:
Audio Conferencing for free
For Enterprise Agreement customers, the offer is available immediately until January 21, 2021 and licenses are free until the end of your enrolment.
For purchases via partners and the web portal, you get the licenses free for 12 months. Offer starts October 1, 2020 and ends March 31, 2021 and isn’t available in China or India.
35% off Teams Advanced Communications
Available now for Enterprise Agreement customers (ends January 31, 2021) and “coming soon” if you buy via partners or the web portal. This is available worldwide.
Microsoft have announced a partnership with Nutanix to help organisations develop multi-cloud and hybrid cloud scenarios. Nutanix clusters will be added into Azure datacentres – extending on-premises Nutanix environments into the cloud:
Software and nodes will be paid for via “Microsoft Azure Consumption Commitment (MACC)” or PAYG, as well as existing Nutanix licenses being portable into Azure. Azure Hybrid Benefits can be utilised on the “Nutanix Clusters on Azure” and Microsoft’s Extended Support Updates are available too. Additionally, via Azure ARC, various Azure services – including Kubernetes – can be run in on-premises Nutanix environments.
Microsoft are really working to extend Azure to as many organisations as possible – VMware on Azure, Azure Stack, Azure Arc, and now this. It seems very much the approach they took to Office software on mobile devices – if you allow people to use your service alongside those from competitors, you end up in a better position that forcing them choose one or the other.
The service is currently in public preview – more info is available here and you can sign up to the waiting list here.
What is the future for the on-premises versions of Exchange Server, SharePoint Server, and Skype for Business Server aka the Productivity Servers? Microsoft’s move to the cloud is clear, successful, and accelerating so where does that leave organisations not yet ready to ditch their locally deployed servers? Will there be another release or are the current 2019 versions the end of the road?
available in the 2nd half of 2021 – so still around 12 months away at the time of writing.
Licensing change
These next releases will be on-premises but available only via a subscription model. Does this mean there will a change to the licensing model i.e. will they remove CALs etc. or is it just the same licenses and metrics but with no perpetual license option? I’m not sure yet but I’ll keep an eye out for more info.
Microsoft are treating this as an intermediate step for customers unwilling to move to Office 365. Once the CAPEX v OPEX argument is removed, I’m sure many orgs will find their move to the cloud speeds up significantly – which is a win for Microsoft.
There are plenty of technical improvements coming for all the products, as well as Exchange Online (including “+ addresses” like Gmail which is cool!) – the Ignite videos and the links below will give more info on those.
Microsoft have always enjoyed a good name change and nowhere has this been more true than their rapidly growing security portfolio. You’ll be pleased to know the pace of change continues following Microsoft Ignite 2020!
What’s changed?
Old name
New name
Microsoft Threat Protection
Microsoft 365 Defender
Microsoft Defender Advanced Threat Protection
Microsoft Defender for Endpoint
Office 365 Advanced Threat Protection
Microsoft Defender for Office 365
Azure Advanced Threat Protection
Microsoft Defender for Identity
Azure Security Center Standard Edition
Azure Defender for Servers
Azure Security Center for IoT
Azure Defender for IoT
Advanced Threat Protection for SQL
Azure Defender for SQLÂ
So gone are the various ATPs and Security Centers but now, like Marvel, we’ve got a bunch of Defenders to contend with!
There have also been a range of new features additions which will continue to strengthen Microsoft’s security offering including support for Amazon AWS and Google Cloud.
Announced at Microsoft Ignite 2020, Power BI Premium has a new “per-user” licensing model. Previously available only via a “capacity” model, at a pretty high price point, this new licensing option will make it more cost effective for companies to get started.
The main reason I talk to people about Power BI Premium is licensing. With Power BI Pro, EVERY user consuming a dashboard need a Pro license – which can get pretty expensive pretty quickly. Power BI Premium per Capacity removes the need for each user to be licensed with Pro meaning, even with it’s high monthly cost, it can work out more cost-effective for heavy use cases.
While there have been feature differences between Pro & Premium, they’ve not been a reason for these conversations – now however, it looks as though that Microsoft hope that may change. This new licensing model makes it easier, and cheaper, for smaller orgs and teams of developers to access the high-end Power BI Premium features. Perhaps this is an effort to compete further with Salesforce Tableau et al.
To access content in a “Premium per-user workspace”, each user must have a “Premium per-user” license so the licensing, in a nutshell is:
If you want to get access to the additional Premium features for named users, Premium per user (PPU) is the way to go.
If you want to allow unfettered access to dashboards without worrying about per user licensing, Premium per capacity is still the answer.
Getting access
Whilst in preview, Power BI Premium per-user will be free of charge. Regarding eventual pricing, Microsoft said in their announcement:
Premium per user will be uniquely affordable and highly competitive among individual user offerings in the industry. Stay tuned for the official pricing announcement as we get closer to the GA timeframe. I guarantee you won’t want to miss it.
The “further details” link below has a well moderated comments section which features several answers from Microsoft clarifying some of the common questions too.
Only a few additions again this month but a couple are pretty interesting.
Azure DevOps Server 2020 is added.
Dynamics 365 Sales Premium is added. This is a new SKU that combines the “Sales Enterprise” and “Sales Insight” licenses for £101.80 per user per month – a saving of £7.50 pupm. Naming wise – I’m not sure that having an “Enterprise” SKU inside a “Premium” SKU really makes sense tbh!
Azure SQL Edge is added. This is a new variant of SQL made for the cloud world with features including:
Azure Stack Edge appears too – this is a physical device you keep on-premises, like a branch office or field location, to “filter, analyse, and transform your data before it moves to Azure”. Lose/damage one and it’s a $40,000 charge!
A new variant of SQL – Azure SQL Edge – is available in public preview and was added to the Product Terms in September 2020.
What is it?
This new flavour of SQL is made for the emerging, growing world of the cloud and edge computing – something of a focus for Microsoft over the last couple of years. Azure SQL Edge is based on SQL Server for Linux and, although it contains only a subset of the full functionality, it also includes features not found in SQL Server for Linux or Windows.
It supports both Intel and ARM processors and runs in containers, currently the only supported scenario is Docker hosts running Ubuntu 16.04 LTS or 18.04 LTS. New features include built-in data streaming and in-database machine learning.
When would you use it?
Microsoft say it is aimed at “edge scenarios” – primarily Internet of Things (IoT) – and it allows data to be analysed and processed before it gets to the central infrastructure; this can lead to faster results and also reduced cloud and network bandwidth utilisation. This latter point is an often overlooked aspect of working with the cloud – more data moving around more places means more network usage and, in many cases, more cost too.
“You don’t need an army of database administrators to install and manage SQL Edge on all your edge devices”
As Azure SQL Edge is container-based, you can deploy it from one portal and then simply update the container as needed. If this is indeed the case, it will help with the “do more with less” approach that comes with cloud – where you can easily end up with many more servers and assets than on-premises, without a matching increase in head count!
Pricing
It’s in Public Preview at the moment, meaning it can be used at no cost (in areas where Azure IoT Edge is available) and more details on pricing and purchase model will be released once the preview is over.
*Update – Feb 2025*
Unfortunately, Azure SQL Edge is being retired by Microsoft as of September 30th, 2025.
Microsoft recommend migrating to:
SQL Server Express
SQL Server Standard
SQL Managed Instance enabled with Azure Arc
None of which are particularly similar to the Edge edition.
Cloudy with a chance of Licensing 